


when the world's burning

by frostbitten_cheeks



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:29:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23465452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostbitten_cheeks/pseuds/frostbitten_cheeks
Summary: Phil is a believer. Dan is not.Also: Phil spends all of his forever searching for Dan, finding him, losing him again. Dan spends his forever in fragments, forgetting Phil in every life only to learn him anew in the next.(a reincarnation au)
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 49





	when the world's burning

**Author's Note:**

> a self-indulgent piece, that got a little out of hand.

In Rome, circa 408 BC, Dan's skin turns golden under the midnoon sun and his eyes are molten and his skin creases between his brows, a mosaic portraying utter concentration. He runs a thumb over the scroll he's immersed in and Phil watches him, the straight slope of his nose, the jut of his collarbones, the light hair that dusts his forearms.

"They will call upon you to war," says Phil, because he thinks it and so he speaks it, with sincerity that he only ever grants himself around Dan. He flexes his fingers against Dan's thigh, white on gold, wishes he was an artist capable of capturing it for eternity.

"They most certainly will not," Dan huffs, in an ancient language soon dead, but the crease between his brows deepens, because they will. Phil spends his days around mathematicians and craftsmen, he fumbles with wood and metal and lets his mind wander, and in the end he invents things that he doesn't understand but that are of value to the senate. Dan spends his days observing the people and writing feverishly, _histography_ , he says, and the senate doesn't understand because if it doesn't help against Athens, it is inconsequential.

Dan is named Duilius in Rome, a man of sharp eyes and a sharper mouth, spouting criticism that the times do not allow. The times do allow for the warmth of his body against Phil's, though, the shine in his eyes when they meet, so Phil twists his fingers in the fabric of Dan's toga and pulls that sharp mouth into his, because the times don't always, and life has taught Phil to take what he can have.

The messenger knocks on Dan's door at sunrise. Phil lets his hands linger at Dan's neck, his shoulders, his hips, and then he's taken to the battlefield. Dan is a fighter, Phil knows, perhaps with more certainty than anything else in his existence, but he is no warrior. 

They are not married, these are not the rules of war, and so when Dan dies no one delivers the news to Phil. Phil learns of his death at the market, hands shaking around fresh fruit, and with a heavy heart that has never stopped breaking, begins the count again.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Phil doesn't know when they met for the first time. He can't always tell them apart -- can't pinpoint the moment he first learnt Dan's face, first tasted his name on his tongue. He remembers Egypt and the Iron Age and India, can some nights awaken remembering lost slivers from Africa, the early days of the first fire and Dan's face burning in front of it. 

Phil thinks, sometimes, that he was born into the world just like this: lungs heaving and fists flailing and his throat choking on Dan's name, a truth he will never unlearn.

There is only one rule to his existence that he struggles to withhold. He establishes it again and again to himself, like a walk over hot coals, like a wound that'll never heal. Phil has decades and centuries and millenniums to think, to reflect upon every question of the universe, to invent himself over and over.

Phil does not, will not, reflect on this: is it worse to be cursed with remembrance and loss, or have bits of history stripped from you with every life.

Dan, like him, does not know when they met for the first time -- because to Dan, every time they meet is the first. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Phil waits two hundred years for the clock to stop ticking forward, meets Dan again at the middle of a paddy field in Imperial China. His arms are laden with weeds, elbows muddy from the damp soil, but he looks up at Phil and his eyes are the same and Phil thinks, _hello again_ , doesn't wait for the recognition that won't ever come.

He spends four decades relearning Dan's face -- the softer curve of his jaw, the thinner bridge of his nose. He memorizes once again the pitch of Dan's voice; his vowels are softer around his words, lilting every morning as they head to the fields. They live on the same land, build their homes side by side from mud and clay, fix the roofs over their heads with the passing of every harvesting season.

Rome, still clear in Phil's mind, was not this, and this is not Rome. His wife and Dan's wife are friendly, and their sons grow up knee-deep in flooded crops, and Phil's hands don't reach to tip the conical hat from Dan's forehead to press lips to his face. Phil takes what he can have, nothing more, nothing less. This isn't the first time and it will never be the last.

Phil, wrinkled and frail, dies first, coughing and rattling but smiling all the same. Dan crouches over him, just as wrinkled, and tells him, "Goodbye, old friend," and Phil's too weak to tell him that for them, every goodbye is another hello.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Years and years later, somewhere in the Victorian era, Dan will spill ink on paper and tell him of a love that isn't fair.

 _I shall remain hopeful_ , he will write, and Phil will read it by the candlelight, _that there is a place for us yet. It is not here, and perhaps not now, but it exists. For it seems impossible that the pain I carry with me in my chest when you are absent is without reason, and fury rises in me at the thought that it will, also, be unlimited._

The times find Dan angry, they find him restless. Phil keeps letters of longing and ire hidden in his attic, responds to them with cheerfulness carefully masquerading heartache. In the end, there is no place for them there and then. Dan sets their letters aflame and tender touches through leather gloves go unspoken. Phil doesn't tell Dan that love rarely is fair, but thinks about _there is a place for us yet_ for ages to come.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Phil lives and Phil dies and Phil reborns, again and again and again. The details of it are foggy, like scattered memories of a dream growing intangible in the morning, but he has them, all of them, recent ones sharper than others.

When Phil is a baby, he has the mind of one, regardless. The threads of his past lives come to him with the natural passage of time and maturing: when Phil's friends are five, they learn to ride a bike while he recalls having ridden one before; when they're eight, they bring milk cartons to school and Phil remembers, somehow, that he should not; when they're twelve, they start pulling on the braids of girls in class, and Phil.

Phil goes to the beach with his parents in the last decade of the twentieth century, and he sees a guy in passing, shirtless, gorgeous under the setting sun, and he blinks, thinks, _I like boys_ , and then, immediately, like an awakening, _I'm searching. I'm always searching for him._

His mum looks at him from over her sunglasses and reaches out, runs a hand through his ginger hair. "You alright, child?", she asks, and he looks at her and nods and never says, _this is not my first life._

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The tide rushes in. Life moves on. Phil grows up, he makes friends, he figures out, step by step, what makes him happy. The nineties are eclectic and technology develops exponentially and Phil was in a radio programme, in the fifties, so speaking to a camera comes as naturally as breathing.

Phil, never not searching, is always already living his life when he finally meets Dan. It's not that Dan's his entire world, but rather the axis point around which everything rotates. Phil lives and Phil laughs and Phil loves other people, but in the end, there is, and always will be, Dan.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Dan, chin in his hands and soft features tinted blue by the light of his laptop, whispers, "Is it weird that I feel like I've known you my whole life, after barely a few months?"

It's three in the morning. Phil wraps himself around a pillow in a soft bed in Rawtenstall, doesn't look away from the boy on his screen. They've been building up to here lately, muffled laughter and cluttered anecdotes and raw honesty in the dead of night, pouring open the very heart of them.

Phil trusts Dan. He lets Dan get to know him, one gnarled bit after the other, making a whole that's a little rusty and a little ragged, a mechanism that has been bent a little out of shape. Dan envelopes him with both hands and pulls closer, willingly, and it's everything shifting into place, not for the first time.

"It's not weird, idiot," Phil says, grin stretching wide, and his eyes linger over the cavity of Dan's dimple, darker in an unlit room. Their internet connection doesn't betray them, for once, and Phil revels in it. "I feel the same way, you know that. You're, like -- you're my best friend."

They have tentative plans to meet next month. They talk about it with an apprehension that isn't like them, a contrast to the boldness with which they tell each other everything else. The reality of it, Phil thinks, is still a little fragile, but they want it so badly that there are nights when it's hard to talk about anything else.

Some mornings Phil wakes with shaking hands, muscle memory from decades of laying them over Dan's skin, feeling the steady beat of his heart. He blinks the room into existence and searches for a body that isn’t there, that was never there, easing himself into the feeling of loss. But Phil's only twenty-two, even if it's for the infinite time in his own history, and he's anxious just as much as he is impatient towards something he doesn’t really know.

Dan chews his lip, dimple deepening, shaking his fringe away from his eyes with a turn of the head. “No, I. I know. You’re mine, too -- like, Jesus. Obviously. I guess I just keep questioning how _easy_ it is, but. I don’t know anyone like you in my life, so maybe it’s not that, you know. Unusual.”

Phil smiles, shoving the left side of his face into the pillow. “I like unusual,” he says, and Dan rolls his eyes fondly. “I think things are unusual when they’re special. You’re special.”

Dan pokes the camera, skin covering the screen. When they’re texting, Dan sends him emoticons to let him know he’s blushing, but the Skype webcam is never sharp enough and Phil’s vibrating for the chance of feeling warm cheeks in person, of seeing the pink blotches he knows are there.

“Let’s watch something together, I can’t deal with your stupid right now,” is what Dan says, in the end. Phil agrees and Dan googles in a bedroom in Wokingham, almost two-hundred miles away. Phil doesn’t bring it up, but he will, soon; the website for the train tickets is open in another tab on his laptop, and has been there for several weeks.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Time and time and time again, it comes down to this:

Dan's text is still open on the phone screen in Phil's hand. _i'm here_ , it says, and everything in Phil's body is stirring, bones knocking together ungracefully. The platform's filled with people stepping off the train and sweat sticks to Phil's temples, there's a pounding in his ears. 

Towering over the crowd, Dan shoulders his way through. He's clutching the strap of his bag and his shoulders are hunched and Phil's so nervous he wants to turn on his heels and run, so exhilarated that he wants to run straight into Dan and tackle him to the ground.

The first thing Dan says to Phil in this life is, "Shit, you really are taller than me," and his voice breaks, throat bobbing. Phil lets out a ridiculous giggle, lets his heart crawl out of his chest.

"Hi," he says, dumbly, eyes shining, fingers clawing into Dan's arm, and Dan laughs back. His laugh is lower, and his face is rounder, but his eyes are just the same. Phil thinks, _hello again,_ and never turns back.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


A decade later, Dan grimaces and says, "Ugh, this is disgusting," spitting into the sink. He picks up the toothpaste tube and glances over to Phil in the mirror, waving it between two fingers. "You sure there was nothing but _licorice flavoured_? My oral hygiene is not fucking worth it."

Phil looks back at him, dabbing his face with a towel. "I _know_ , I'm sorry, they were all out! But it's not that bad, I mean -- did you know the Egyptians invented the toothpaste? And they used to make it from disgusting things like _eggshells_ , so we're really doing okay."

Dan raises both eyebrows, mouth quirking up. There's a smear of paste by his bottom lip and Phil thumbs it, mindlessly. "Mate, how the _fuck_ do you know these things. I swear you hide trivia books from me just to pull shit like that."

Phil thinks, vaguely, that about seven thousand years ago he used to crush plants into powder to overcome the taste, sold it in a tiny sandy settlement by the Nile. It's a fleeting thought, a very distant memory, so he says, "You know I follow the weirdest pages on Instagram," instead.

Dan, with a bullheaded determination that has trailed him through every life, does not believe in things that cannot be proven. Phil loves this enough that he never even tries.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The ugliest truth of Phil's life is the one he keeps close, tucked between his creaking ribs, away from light. It's the fine print, the heart of the matter, the butt of the joke.

The ugliest, rotten truth is this: Phil watches Dan die a million times, immeasurable, but it is still, always and forevermore, better than the alternative.

Because when Phil cries dust and dirt into Dan's curls on battlefields, when he lays him down into hospital beds, when he braces for the crash that will always come, he gets to hold Dan's hand one last time, gets to say goodbye.

Between those deaths there are lives, equal in number and just as immeasurable, where the universe intervened. In which Phil found Dan too late, or in the wrong place, wrong time, was the wrong person. In which Dan's married, or Dan's uninterested, or Dan's forced by life and chance to turn his head away from Phil, sentencing them both to living parallel lives but always separately.

Phil doesn't get to watch Dan die, in these lives. He doesn't hold him in his arms, doesn't dig a grave to grieve, he waits and he waits and he lives his life, and he dies, and he waits some more for it all to begin again.

The rotten truth is this: it truly is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. Phil loves and he loses in an endless, condemned cycle, keeps the deaths close to his chest and cherishes the chance to love, knows it down the damned soul in his emptied chest.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


In London, circa 2015, Dan holds the result of a hectic year up to the camera, lights reflecting off the glossy print.

His words are practiced and Phil nods along, watches him and the camera in halves. They have their hands full, numbers constantly running, a tour and then more and then the five-year plan, stretched out in front of them.

But when Dan says, "There once there were these two guys called Dan and Phil, who met each other on the internet, and created this entire world,” Phil thinks --

Phil smiles, Phil laughs, Phil curls his hands into the book and thinks, he will always have this. Decades and centuries and millenniums in the future, he will still have this, a solid proof, a handwoven memento. He has always seen time as unending, eternal, but he thinks, now, that maybe it’s time to sink his heels into the ground and start clinging to each life he’s given, treasure it.

“Tough luck, bastard,” Dan kisses his thumb, later, watching back on the footage. “Now you’ll never be able to forget me.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


On a bright afternoon, unremarkable in any way, they carry their mugs outside to look at the sky. Dan's skin turns golden under the sun, darker from months of early running in its rise, and Phil suddenly remembers Rome with a vividness that doesn't usually come to him in the twenty-first century.

"How can you not believe in fate," he asks, tugging on the tail of a conversation that was abandoned some time ago. His voice is deep, intimate, and he watches the shape of Dan's face that's returned to him, angles that have tethered him to lifetimes Dan will never know. 

Dan taps away at his phone, lost in an analytical piece on unreliable telling of human history, the crease between his brows always deeper. He huffs, distracted, and says, "Come on, Phil, you can't _honestly_ think this is all some predetermined bullshit. We live, we die, the end. Everything in between is arbitrary and random and completely up to our choice."

Phil sips from his mug, quiet. He hooks his foot over Dan's ankle and searches for the scatter of freckles on Dan's cheek, the teeth marks in his pink lips, the glint of the hoop in his ear. He thinks of relearning Dan's name, Dan's face, Dan's soul, a million times over, thinks of finding him in this life, on a train platform in Piccadilly, and says, finally, "Yeah, maybe you're right. It does seem, somehow, that I always come back to choosing you."

**Author's Note:**

> me: i'll just write a tiny fic about rebirth to cure me of my writing-block!  
> also me: (googles social classes in imperial china 200 bc at 2am)
> 
> p.s. i choose to believe that the physical pain in your chest that biology can't explain is that pretentious thing dan says in every life.


End file.
